The other deck had a defective Six of Clubs. I just started doing my taxes and noticed that I bought eight cases of Turner Gold Seal playing cards this year-not eight bricks, eight gross! That’s over 1000 Turner decks! Out of thousands of decks, I’ve only come across two decks of cards that were unusable. On average, I buy around 7-800 Turner Gold Seal decks of cards a year. Lay people read this and think, “Oh I see… he’s using specially cut playing cards. Pro tip: If you use Gold Seals, remove the gold sticker. So, now Turner decks are what I use most often. They’re traditionally cut, great card stock, and consistently above par with the quality control (…except for that damn gold seal sticker that’s stuck to the box with the strongest glue on the face of the planet.) They’re about $3.50 a deck but they’re worth it. This deck was everything that the old Rider back Bikes were and more. Then, along came the Cadillac of quality playing cards: Richard Turner’s Gold Seals. Those days are gone when it comes to the Standard Bikes. There was a day when I could open a deck right from the shrink-wrap during my act. That’s the only thing I could do with that deck. I opened one deck and found that there was no finish on any of the cards. Some decks simply would not faro due to the poor edges. The decks were mostly still useable, but I noticed that I was opening a deck before a show to make sure they were okay to use. Over the next few years, I noticed more and more that the quality was inconsistent. So, I printed my own stickers of Rider back back designs and solved that issue. The biggest problem for me was the new design on the back of the card case. I could still do faro work and estimation just fine. Or, perhaps a deck felt considerably thinner. It just meant that every so often there was a deck that was a little rough around the edges. This didn’t mean that the cards were unusable. And, wtf happened to the pull tabs on the shrink-wrap?! The box design changed, the card stock got thinner, the finish changed, and the feel and overall quality of the cards diminished. Then, as we all remember, the USPCC changed to the Standards we see today. The decks were traditionally cut and they were consistently awesome decks of cards. Roughly twenty years ago, I used to buy Rider back Bikes exclusively from wholesale clubs like Sam’s Club, Costco, and BJ’s. So, for this blog, I’ll share with you what I’ve noticed after about twenty years of working with Bicycle decks. I noticed that most people were talking about the poor quality of Bicycle cards. I recently posted a photo of a defective Bicycle playing card across my social media accounts and it got way more attention than I expected.

Casino quality playing cards